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Grieving: A Record Of My Becoming, Neyshka Diaz Maldonado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This memoir travels into my experience growing up in Puerto Rico throughout moments of joy, sorrow, triumph, and growth. Through memorable recollections and introspective thoughts, the memoir navigates memory, offering insights into my relationships, aspirations, and struggles. Each chapter unfolds and captures the essence of my life up until this moment.

I explore my ability to overcome challenges with resilience and grace, discovering strength in vulnerability and wisdom in the face of adversity. Through moments of self-discovery and profound transformation, they unearth the threads of my resilience, embracing both the light and shadow that define my life experience.

This memoir …

Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …

Inheritance: A Memoir, Jennifer Skoog

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I was born and raised on a small farm in central Minnesota, the youngest of nine. Our lives centered around a dogmatic faith that banned sex education and birth control in any form. The consequences of these teachings put my life on a tragic course, and I paid dearly for my ignorance. With the help of a therapist and a deep commitment to myself, I left the faith. After I earned a college degree in my early 40s, I began to critically examine my upbringing. Through my educational journey in Black studies, I saw deeply troubling ways in which my …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

Party On, Derrida!: A Queer, Deconstructionist Look At Wayne's World, Glam, And The Losers Of Rock And Roll, Michelle A. Arp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What do you get when you mix a girl from Long Island, critical theory, a movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, David Bowie, and alternative rock of the early 2000s? A lot of losers, a lot of queerness, and plenty of room for deconstruction.

Part performance studies, part queer studies, and part memoir, this study is a cross-genre and experimental analysis of postmodern ideologies, rock and roll, and comedy. More specifically, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the slash” (Of Grammatology, 1967) in relation to high and low culture via comedies, such that of Wayne’s World …

The Way We Dream Now: History, Theory, And Lgbtq Memoir In America, Megan Paslawski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines American memoirs written after 2000 by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors with an eye to how the recent institutionalization of queer theory and the open production of LGBTQ histories affect these writers’ conceptions of their lives, aspirations, and cultures. I argue that these memoirs, sometimes consciously, find themselves struggling with what are also competing ideas within queer theory about the queerness of futurity even as they turn to the past of queer/trans literature and history to bolster their senses of possible identities and communities. This often has the effect of positioning contemporary LGBTQ writers as …